Comment by matheusmoreira

Crowdfunding. Services like Patreon, Kickstarter, GitHub Sponsors.

People should be paid for the labor of creating, not for artificially scarce copies of the finished product.

Patronage has been known as an alternative to copyright since around 200 years ago:

https://www.thepublicdomain.org/2014/07/24/macaulay-on-copyr...

The cited drawbacks are valid: creators are beholden to the elites who fund their work, and their influence in their creative process is felt to this day.

With modern technology, however, funding is diffused through large groups of people which minimizes this impact through diversification.

The ideal model is one where lots of people pitch in to fund a creator for the full cost of creating something, then the resulting work is released directly to the public domain.